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Analysis of SCO vs. IBM
icantblvitsnotbutter writes "An excellent -- and clear! -- article over at LinuxWorld.com has a multipoint analysis of SCO's 40-page complaint (this is a brief?!). For all those IANAL's out there, here's something to sink your teeth into. On the balance, the outlook seems positive for IBM. Still, the parallel invocation of a contractural clause potentially nixing AIX lends some credence to claims that this is a just way for SCO to coerce IBM into buying them out..." Some old documents from a similar lawsuit have surfaced, and naturally ESR has his own take on the case.
Will wonders never cease? LOL
IBM has released a notification that they finally understood the argument in the SCO paper.
#include
if(sco.suing(ibm)) {
panic();
}
This alleged action strengthens Linux, and, because Linux is no-cost or almost-no-cost, it cuts the legs out from under SCO's market.
[intense cynical sarcasm]
Damn free stuff always screwing us over.
[/intense cynical sarcasm]
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
"Freep wibble hatstand! If IBM all had guns, they'd have shot SCO dead by now and it would have been their civic duty and we'd all be free of this insanity. Pass my AK homie. Fish custard ruhbarb and out."
Patent application for a device, made of fabrics like, but not limited to cotton, silk or wool, sewed to, or into garments like, but not limited to, pants, coats, underwear, shirts, etc, which permits to store objects like, but not limited to cellphones, sandwiches, glasses etc, in order to not having them to carry around by hand ("manually").
A pocket? You mean there IS prior art?
~
Almost nothing new there which you couldnt have found by not sifting through earlier slashdot stories. What I would have really liked is something on the lines of "Here is patent number 1" and here is how linux is different/same.....
It is not as if SCO patent reads like "WE patent UNIX and everything that looks like it. And that is that.They have to patent some feature of the OS which they can accuse IBM of violating"
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
IBM: Here's one.
Judge: Ninepence.
SCO: I'm not dead!
Judge: What?
IBM: Nothing. Here's your ninepence.
SCO: I'm not dead!
Judge: 'Ere. He says he's not dead!
IBM:Yes, he is.
SCO: I'm not!
Judge: He isn't?
IBM: Well, he will be soon. He just filed a 9000 word legal brief.
Looks like it was written by a high school student, but none the less, what a nice brief. Dont those SCO People work hard?
Plus, their case doesn't hold water because, the SCO that we're talking about is not the same SCO as the SCO that provided Unix, after AT&T.
This SCO is caldera. The old SCO is SCO. Do the math, Caldera != SCO. Therefore, I do not see their grounds at all.
If SCO is just about to sell out, and is attempting to inflate it's 'intellectual property equity' in the hope that someone with money may buy them? Or maybe there are already talks underway?
If not, this appears to be a horrid act of desperation.
Amicus Curiae - what the hell does that mean? Is it latin for Anonymous Coward?
There's nothing worse than having someone on your side who makes you look so bad they might as well be playing for the other team.
I think they'd have a pretty good chance of ending up owning all of SCO.
Not that it's worth much.
Averment 41
Shared libraries are by their nature unique creations based on various decisions to write code in certain ways, which are in great part random decisions of the software developers who create the shared library code base.
It's interesting to note that SCO considers the decisions of programmers to be basically random.
-- Fuck Beta
I would think that after all of the legal (and pseduo-legal) stuff that gets posted and referenced here at ./, nearly everyone would realize that in legal circles, "Brief" is a technical term neither describing the length of the document, nor the time it takes to read one.
Or should I just make an analogy to a brief COBOL program?
I don't remember it this was posted already in previous discussions, but in this interview with IBM Kernel Hackers from last year, some points are raised, some good and some bad for IBM, specially in the 2nd question. In short, the people at IBM that was into the linux kernel development can't take parts of i.e. AIX code and put into Linux and viceversa, but some interchange of ideas could have been happened if a developer of one team talks with one of another.
Black's Legal Dictionary defines amicus curiae: "A person with a strong interest in or views on the subject matter of an action may petition the court for permission to file a brief ostensibly on behalf of a party, but actually to suggest a rationale consistent with its own views. Such amicus curiae briefs are commonly filed in appeals concerning matters of broad public interest; e.g. civil rights cases".
I found this item here.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Your function looks a little bit like c++. This could not be the kernel because the kernel is written in c.
Reading the Linux world article SCO claims that Linux advanced features such as failover SMP etc could only come about after many years of development. However I do find it a bit narrow sighted in that they think that IBM is the only one who could procduce this software and port it. There are other blue chips out there who have written failsafe software and ported it to Linux. Personally I think SCO is talking rubbish (well at least on this point at least). I really need to read all 40 pages of their document but don't really have the time. (heh who does :)
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
And they were going to rename it the Pernel to make it clearer.
Averment 77: Related to the development of the open source software development movement in the computing world, an organization was founded by former MIT professor Richard Stallman entitled "GNU."
RMS may be surprised to learn he is a former MIT professor.
He is not; he is a former GNU/MIT professor.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
they do that your Norweigan Blue. Beautiful plumage!
this sig steers like a cow. and i can prove it
I'm reminded of a few(!) years ago when I was reading about development on the Atari 8-bit computers. A columnist for Analog magazine wrote about how he could not divulge certain information about memory mapping of the 400/800 computers because of his Non-Discolsure Agreement - BUT - that if he found out the same information from a third party he could then treat said information as public domain, and then was not bound by the NDA.
I would be interested in knowing if the knowledge shared here had slipped into the public domain, because if so then NDAs do not apply.
IANAL
While I have no idea if SCO has a case or not, I see that many here assume IBM had nothing to do with making Linux enterprise stable, and scoff at SCO's claim.
Yet, if you take the time to google the web you'll find that IBM dedicated an entire internal group to Linux and hired several external companies during 1999-2001 with the sole purpose of making Linux entreprise strength (even Linus has said so).
Now, to be clear, this does not yet prove that any illegal transfer of technology took place (and I doubt SCO will be able to prove it, IMHO they are fishing hoping to find the smoking gun during discovery), but it does verify one of the main three claims from SCO.
These folks have pretty much turned on us. I spent a great deal of effort learning UNIX, getting my SCO CUSA, ACE, and Master ACE. SCO ruined that by no longer being competitive, not keeping up with technology, not marketing their products well, and mistreating their reseller channel. They got their asses kicked by a college student in Finland because they got lazy and stupid. It serves them right. I am now questioning whether or not I should have tried to become a dealer of their wares when I struck out on my own.
.001 per share:
e m
I'm finished when 'em. I'll support their products while my clients still have them, but as soon as the first opportunity to upgrade comes along, we're migrating!
Here is an excerpt about who the money grabbers are, and when they acquired for
http://biz.yahoo.com/t/s/scox.html
Here is my new policy:
http://www.dentar.com/index.php?scoprobl
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
Hoe could they release a document with so many factual and grammatical errors? I would have thought the lawyers would at least do a little proofreading and fact checking.
Regardless, since UNIX was licensed to universities to study couldn't the concepts SCO claims were "stolen" by IBM simply have been studied by the Linux developers when they were in school?
These people look deep into my soul and assign me a number based on the order I joined.
Well, I don't mind. Getting your dick sucked by a guy or a girl feels just about the same.
Maybe I'll just go and cruise glory-holes next.
1. Piracy funds terrorism
2. Linux violates SCO's IP
3. Linux supports terrorism <---
4. Profit!
There is a lot of scope for MS for spreading FUD. Watch out.
Everybody is talking about IBM buying SCO. What are the chances of Microsoft buying SCO?
I know it is the "hip" and "cool" thing to rag on ESR for his views on pretty much anything, however this brief is a very well written document and worth your time to read it. Whatever his precieved faults, he is able to put this issue in clearer prospective for me than the the original posting did.
"Friend of the Court" -- in other words, a 3rd-party attempting to meddle in the affairs of the court case at hand.
What? So Caldera buying them wasn't good enough? Go figure. Considering the companies this SCO/Caldera monstrosity has sued in the past, it seems that these tactics are nothing but a desparate bid for survival. Perhaps redoing their business model and creating a modernized viable product might be a better way to go?
D: the humble start of an opening towards the IBM SNA protocols
D: libmodem author
D: IBM Turboways 25 ATM Device Driver
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Sorry sir/ma'am, you're gay/female/disabled/ugly/short/liberal/Jewish nad you really just flaunt it too much. I'm going to pay you half as much as I pay this guy over here who looks like me and has a similar last name.
... Not in the legal sense of the word, at least. You can't walk into a courtroom and say "your Honor, I claim the sky is blue". Sure, in the English sense of the word it's a claim; in the legal sense of the word, it's not a claim because it lacks standing before the court. I.e., great, the sky's blue: why should the court care? Great, IBM helped Linux get ready for the enterprise: why should the court care?
A claim is basically a statement of "... and this is why the court should care". So far, SCO's argument about why the court should care doesn't hold water. I'm not worried.
Ha ha! We got another one. Go team! Note to Gay Agenda: Secret recruiting/infection plan proceeding. Put in another order for pumps and lipstick.
... the fact that ESR apparently doesn't know what Amicus Curiae means, or that he obviously reads too much /., since the first thing he could think of was Anonymous Coward.
As some of you said, there were many stories published about the SCO vs IBM lawsuit. But I don't think I saw any comments about this Forbes story. Here is a short quote: "Not only has SCO Group filed a $1 billion lawsuit against IBM for misappropriation of trade secrets, but the tiny company says it will yank IBM's Unix license in 100 days if it does not cease what SCO deems are anti-competitive practices."
In his text he says:
Linux was independently invented by Linus Torvalds in 1991
Independent? How is using Minix and copying the SYS V API "independent"?
ESR talks about SCO taking liberties, and he does the same.
Try that hypothesis out in the real world and see how far you get.
I know. I'm not talking about legality, I'm talking about ethics. I think most would agree that paying someone less because he's liberal or short is an untenable position (provided he's able to do the job). That was my point.
Remember the movie Dogma by Kevin Smith? Here's the rundown of it.
"A female decendant of Christ and two unlikely prophets are called upon by Rufus, an unknown 13th apostle, to stop two angels, that were cast out of heaven, from unknowingly erasing all of God's work by restoring their souls by entering a new church. Restoring ones soul by entering a new church is a part of the Catholic Dogma, and by restoring their souls the angels could reenter heaven thus revealing there is a loophole to return to heaven. This would prove God was not perfect and upon proving this all of God's work would immediately be erased."
If IBM buys SCO outright or from the smothering runins, IBM will gian the rights to UNIX and may also chose to release it under GPL. If someone decides to use the UNIX kernel using GNU O/S, it will become GNU/UNIX.
GNU's Not UNIX/UNIX???
This contridiction will bring calmady to the IT world and bring end the free software movement (including GPL).
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Averment 23:
Except for SCO, none of the primary UNIX vendors ever developed a UNIX
"flavor" to operate on an Intel-based processor chip set.
This is complete nonsense. SCO went to great efforts to deliberately try
to kill UNIX back in the early days! It was competition to XENIX, and
they didn't want any of that.
The first port of UNIX on the 286 (and later) 386 was done, and sold,
by Microport (and was so recognized by Intel).
SCO pulled a number of dirty tricks to try and kill Microport, including
getting Microsoft to threaten a lawsuit - which is very similar to the
one they are trying to pull here.
Since Microport was too small to fight Microsoft, they managed to
out maneuver them technically. Which ultimately resulted in the end in
killing XENIX.
No doubt IBM will end up handing SCO's head back to them on a silver platter.
It isn't too hard.
I wouldn't agree at all. If I don't like your beliefs, I don't feel the need to employ you. I wouldn't hire someone who was openly racist no matter how good their work was. If I really disagree with your belief on something, and you're an entertainer, I might not pay money to see you. Hell, I won't see a movie with Tom Cruise because he dumped Nicole Kidman.
I just finished reading the brief. I must say that for the first half or so, I was very impressed with it. It was simple, logical and factual. However, by the end, it seemed to devolve into a statement of beliefs and feelings that, to me, did not feel right in a court brief. For example:
SCO's complaint, in all its brazen mendacity, is the last gasp of proprietary Unix. The open-source community and its allies are more than competent to carry forward the Unix tradition. We pray that all assertions of exclusive corporate ownership over this tradition be given a swift and merciful end.
Am I the only one who thought that this was not the forum for such OpenSource flag-waving?
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
Some quotes from the brief:
...even were we to assume that every dime of their revenue came from the enterprise market, their 2002 share could not have exceeded 3.1% [4] This is at the level of statistical noise.
...Novell's proprietary entitlement in the code so small, that Novell's lawyers had to settle for a minor, face-saving gesture...
...On Internet time, the Bell Labs minicomputer-centered codebase of 1989-1995 is hardly ... relevant to today's enterprise scalability challenges on today's PCs...
You tell 'em ESR!
Pretty far. I boycott all sorts of things/people based on what they support. Other people on Slashdot seem to have no problem boycotting the RIAA/MPAA/etc because of their practices. How are individuals any different? In the Klan on the weekends? Well, don't expect to work for me during the week.
Good point from ESR's brief regarding this.
Perhaps these guys should should check their drinking water for hallucinogens.
Furthermore, Linux was already far more advanced and "enterprise ready" before IBM even touched it than SCO gives it credit for NOW.
I was using Linux on SMP machines before IBM ever came on the scene. IBM's LVM was turned down. IBM's JFS is probably the least used JFS in Linux, Reiser and Ext3 being the most predominant.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Except for SCO, none of the primary UNIX vendors ever developed a UNIX "flavor" to operate on an Intel-based processor chip set. This is because the earlier Intel processors were considered to have inadequate processing power for use in the more demanding enterprise market applications.
Sun Microsystems needs to improve its marketing efforts for Solaris x86.
Not to mention that IBM released AIX/PS2 back in the early 1990s -- a version of AIX that ran on 80386 based PS/2 hardware.
It sucked to the extent that the hardware it ran on sucked. A big, bloated Unix kernel running on an 80386 with a maximum of 16 megs of memory and a 60 meg ESDI hard drive was pretty close to a non-starter.
This is not about UNIX!!! This is about PROJECT MONTEREY!!!
Monterey was a real, live, flesh and blood endeavor in which SCO and IBM partnered to write a new, 64-bit, proprietary Über-Unix on Intel hardware. SCO committed real, live, flesh and blood engineers to the project, and real, honest to goodness, cold, hard cash. IBM walked away from the table. The question is: How much SCO intellectual property did IBM walk away with, and how much of it found its way to IBM's Linux projects? If, through discovery, SCO can prove that a substantial number of IBM's Project Monterey engineers were re-assigned to IBM Linux projects, then SCO will have a reasonably solid foundation on which to proceed with the case.
This is no different than Intergraph's highly successful court cases against Intel, in which Intergraph proved that Intel had stolen substantial amounts of Intergraph intellectual property.
Google on Project Monterey SCO IBM
Google on Intergraph Intel
Somehow, "nixing" seems to be an oddly appropriate word usage here.... :-D
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
This alone, from SCO's complaint:
Averment 86: It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach UNIX performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of UNIX code, methods or concepts to achieve such performance, and coordination by a larger developer, such as IBM.
I hope the rest of their case shows the same degree of arrogance and technical ineptitude. IBM would have little to worry about.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
When you're an employer the rules are different. Sure, individuals are free to boycott whoever and whatever they like. I refuse to watch any Travolta movies because he is a Scientologist. I only by eggs that are from "Free Range" chickens. I do not purchase Microsoft software as I find the company unethical. The list goes on.
However, if I am an employer then I don't get to apply my prejudice to job applicants. No matter how much you or I may dislike the concept of Political Correctivism that is basically the law.
I'd really be interested to see what kind of damages SCO can prove. They may end up racking up millions in dollar of legal fees for a very small reward, if any.
Even the IBM/AT&T agreement is valid, I'd be surprised if IBM wasn't smart enough to isolate engineers with knowledge of SCO Unix source code from engineers assisting in the Linux development. I mean, c'mon, IBM has been in the computer industry since ENIAC and has been in business almost twice that long! Does anybody really believe IBM can't write a non-disclosure agreement and isolate its employees? SCO makes it sound like the 7,000 IBM engineers working on Linux are the only engineers IBM has, thus, IBM must have violated trade secrets! PLEASE! IBM employs hundreds of thousand of people and probably 10 times the number of engineers they have working on Linux.
Just because IBM has thrown some effort into Linux, doesn't mean they are tossing AIX out the window. It is probably a wait and see... if Linux really catches on, we can move AIX enterprises over and add Linux enterprises with the benefits of the GPL. IBM is now a service provider, and the reality is, the only way you make money with Linux is providing service.
It'll be interesting to see how much the lawyers end up making out of all this.
-Anthony
have you seen his wife? You;d be a full time drunk too!
One of the major gripes of SCO is that Linux would not have been able to have SMP support if it weren't for IBM lifting SCO Unix code and handing it out for the kernel developers.
Perhaps they should read this article at IBM DeveloperWorks. This page pretty much explains why IBM decided to go the way of the fat penguin.
It should be worth pointing out this quote from the article:
Linux has had support for SMP waaaaaay long before IBM adopted it and apparently this was one of their reasons for adopting Linux. I also read in a magazine once (I think it was Time or Newsweek c.a. 1998 IIRC but someone please correct the datePlus there is also the fact that a year before IBM adopted Linux, they (among others)made large hardware available to Linux developers for testing and benchmarks.
0xB00F disappears in a puff of smoke...
Then explain how John Rocker was suspended/demoted over comments he made? As long as you outline what's acceptable behavior, and what is not, you have quite a bit of lattitude.
Subject says it all.
Vertrauen Sie mir, ich weiß was ich sage!
Jörg
From ESR document: The truth is otherwise. SCO never had significant enterprise market share either before or after its purchase of the Unix source code from Novell. Examination of SCO's 10Ks reveals that, even were we to assume that every dime of their revenue came from the enterprise market, their 2002 share could not have exceeded 3.1% [4] This is at the level of statistical noise.
Your Honor, this is known as the SCO Uncertainty Principle (it as also known as Schroedinger's sales figures). SCO may have actually made sales of their Unix in the enterprise market, we aren't really sure. What we may have here is the sales equivalent of artifact. We'll give them 3.1% and call it generous.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemnded, but loved and bought with blood.
The key to this case is the discovery phase. If the judge allows SCO to go forth with discovery, they can begin to prove their case that IBM Monterey engineers were re-assigned to IBM Linux projects [by examining employment records], and then go from there to showing the actual loss of intellectual property [by examining email records, memoranda, minutes of meetings, and unpublished IBM Linux code & unpublished IBM Linux documentation].
IBM lawyers, on the other hand, will do everything in their power to prevent discovery in the first place - by having the discovery motion quashed and the case thrown out.
Wonderful writup.
However, I think it is a mistake to throw in DRm at the end. It bears only passingly on the issues at end and is controversial in its own right even within the open source community. The facts are strong and stand on their own.
The author of the LinuxWorld piece is doing advocacy, not analysis. SCO's case is far more subtle than most in the Linux community seem to think.
As an example, the author takes issue with the SCO's claim that IBM must have stolen SCO trade secrets in order to improve Linux by saying "OK, then, diff the code." It's true that such a diff would provide prima facie proof of violation, but there are plenty of violations which would not require any code to leak at all.
Suppose part of the validation test set for Monterey consisted of a stress test written by SCO and owned by SCO. That code wouldn't ever be in the final product, and it would certainly be SCO's intellectual property, shared with IBM in order to make Monterey work better. Let us further suppose that code was used in the Linux development work, and found a key set of bugs. (Don't tell me it isn't possible that it would have been -- developers tend to think of tools as just tools, and forget that they may be encumbered.) At that point, there would been a misappropriation of IP.
(Disclaimer: I have not ever seen any of the code covered by any of these agreements, nor have I ever seen any tests in the Monterey test suite, nor had any contact with any of the principals in this lawsuit. I'm merely criticizing the LinuxWorld piece; any resemblance between the situation outlined here and reality would be purely coincidental.)
Is International Business Machines Corporation really a Delaware corporation, as is claimed in the complaint?
Some of SCO's accusations are so blatantly wrong, they make my head hurt doing the necessary mental gymnastics needed to validate any part of SCO's twisted logic:
"Averment 23: [omitted for brevity]"
This is entirely irrelevant. Linus started Linux on the '386 because it was available and had the features needed for his pet project. Intel processors' ability/inability to function at "enterprise level" at this point in time doesn't matter one iota.
"Averment 78: The primary purpose of the GNU organization is to create free software based on valuable commercial software. The primary operating system advanced by GNU is Linux."
The primary purpose of GNU is to provide a high quality, freely usable/modifyiable/redistributable implementation of an operating system that functions similarly to Unix. I argue that the value of commercial Unix was collapsing until the widespread use of Linux with the GNU system.
The primary operating system advanced by GNU is GNU. The Free Software Foundation has long been grudgingly accepting Linux until the Hurd is ready to replace it. SCO is completely distorting reality here.
Averment 79: In order to assure that the Linux operating system (and other software) would remain free of charge and not-for-profit, GNU created a licensing agreement entitled the General Public License ("GPL").
Have the SCO lawyers ever read the GPL?? The GPL specifies, in plain language, that it encourages profit motives for GPL software. You can sell it for as much as people are willing to pay for it. You just can't make it closed/proprietary. The GPL was created to ensure that people would never have the rug pulled out from under them by a greedy/unscrupulous company like SCO.
Averment 82: Linux has evolved through bits and pieces of various contributions by numerous (italics mine) software developers using single processor computers
I italicized "numerous" here. A large group of highly motivated individuals can accomplish wonderous things. I wonder if SCO thinks that complicated software just spontaneously comes into existence all by itself. More likely, SCO thinks that only it has highly talented and highly motivated people. Looking at what happened to Unix after SCO bought it, I'm doubtful that SCO employs any of the latter.
In the last several years, multi-processor systems have fallen in price enough that groups of low-paid individuals could afford to buy shared systems. More importantly, the price of dual processor systems have dropped in price enough that individuals can afford to buy them privately. (sarcasm on)But since Linux is developed solely by poor hippies, that couldn't possibly have happened(sarcasm off).
Also, there is nothing that disallows IBM from providing commodity hardware and publicly available specifications to some developers with the explicit purpose of providing access to otherwise prohibitively expensive hardware for expanding Linux's capabilities.
To comment on the author's closing remarks:
"This case serves as a reminder that organizations take non-disclosures seriously."
This case serves as a reminder of just how incredibly important the GNU and Linux projects are to the computing industry. Once this type of nonsense can be swept into the historical shitcan, we can all work in a more peaceful environment.
I hope IBM shreds SCO with legal fees and then countersues to recover them. Let SCO end its life in unrecoverable debt.
...IBM, AT&T, or Lucent buying the remains of USL and UNIX?
Let's just pray that Microsoft doesn't get any ideas.
One trivia point: SCO's SMP implementation was not written by SCO but was licensed from Corollary.
Two more i386 ports that ESR has forgotten about: Altos (later purchased by Acer). I was one of the engineers that ported SCO 3.2.0 (or was it 3.2.2?) to the Altos 1000 (see Google groups for info). The second is the "Sun 386i" 80386 computer which everybody seems to have forgotten about. Again, see Google groups.
IMHO the only thing of value SCO was to contribute to Monterey was the X server.
I believe that from a legal standpoint AIX is licensed SVR3 code (although having seen AIX kernel code, SCO OpenServer and UnixWare source, and "pure" virgin SVR3 code I can attest that AIX is a complete overhaul and bears no resemblence to pure SVR3 (or SVR4) except in the bowels of STREAMS).
full disclosure: ex-SCO employee who worked on all kernels including Monterey prior to Caldera.
Avertment 84: "Prior to IBM's involvement, Linux was the software equivalent of a bicycle. UNIX was the software equivalent of a luxury car. To make Linux of necessary quality for use by enterprise customers, it must be re-designed so that Linux also becomes the software equivalent of a luxury car. This re-design is not technologically feasible or even possible at the enterprise level without (1) a high degree of design coordination, (2) access to expensive and sophisticated design and testing equipment; (3) access to UNIX code, methods and concepts; (4) UNIX architectural experience; and (5) a very significant financial investment."
Help fight continental drift.
How about a nice hot cup of coffee at McDonalds?
Actually if you read the court documents (as I have) you would change your mind on that one.
The original award was no doubt excessive ($4M) but the victim's lawyer made a good point that McD's coffee is served dangerously hot, for no specific reason. That every year hundreds of customers require significant medical attention after burning themselves sipping McD's coffee (third degree burns). That said customers had requested McD do not serve coffee as hot. That McD's coffee is served quite a few degrees hotter than the rest of the industry. That flavour-wise there is no reason to serve the coffee scalding hot (to the contrary, it damages the flavour)..
Yes one should expect coffee to be hot, no, one should not expect coffee to cause third degree burns that require medical attention when carelessly sipping it.
"If you remember some of the recent lawsuit outrages (How about a nice hot cup of coffee at McDonalds?) then you wont be so confident."
Far be me to correct a lawyer, but the coffee was too hot, even by McDonald's standards, and they had been warned by HQ about this more than once.
More importantly by putting this document out for review the OpenSource model itself is being used to improve the Amicus Brief. All facts will will have needed documentation, and a list of people to testify will most likely be available.
This is very clever and it's recursive nature would be poetic justice if indeed it helps defeat the SCO claim.
Help fight continental drift.
The native file system for OS/2 was HPFS. JFS was originally on AI/X, and was later ported to OS/2. Admittedly, a lot of the work on JFS on OS/2 was used for JFS on Linux, but that still does not change the fact that JFS is indeed from AI/X.
sigs are a waste of space
Methinks SCO is in for a slaughter. Perens dissection of the complaint is impressive to say the least. If half of it is proved in court SCO has no case whatsoever.
His skills and knowledge is very valuable to us and i think many people underestimate just how important people like Bruce Perens is to the open source community.
Thanks Bruce!
HTTP/1.1 400
Then explain how John Rocker was suspended/demoted over comments he made? As long as you outline what's acceptable behavior, and what is not, you have quite a bit of lattitude.
there is gulf of difference in how the courts treat employees working under individual contract and regular employees, which varies still yet from state to state. In NC, a commissioned salesman has less protection than an hourly employee, for instance. He is considered a contract employee, who doesn't need the same type of protection.
If I hire you under contract to do a task, and layout the terms, then I can make you live up to them. If I hire you by the hour, then you have to live up to the published rules of behavior that my company has, but you can fight those rules as unfair in court, and possbily win. If you signed a contract as an individual (as opposed to union negociated) then you are bound to all the terms, as long as they legal. If YOUR contract says you have to keep you head shaved, then you have to. If my company rules say all employees must keep their heads shaved and I fire Sally for not shaving her head, she can sue for the law being unreasonable.
It may sound stupid, but its the law.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I didn't say IBM has contributed nothing, but the level of contribution is greatly exaggerated by SCO. Furthermore, SCO's claims imply that Linux, in it's current form, is far behind where Linux was in actuality before IBM came on the scene.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
One thing they missed is the whole BSD "fork" of UNIX. Back in the old days, AT&T gave pretty much every University a site license. One of these of course was UC Berkeley, where they did some some pretty core work, such as this unimportant thing we call TCP/IP. For a long time folks referred to TCP/IP as "Berkely sockets". Hmm, they also gave us C-shell, so maybe they shouldn't get off unpunished. BSD got folded into the "one True UNIX" in SVR4.
As far as "getting up to enterprise grade" speed comparisons goes, they're at some level irrelevant, at least in the way SCO framed it. UNIX vendors had to blaze trails, find their way, mess up, and find the true path again. Linux followed these trails in the form of POSIX. It's much quicker to code to a spec than have to code and lay out the spec, distribute the spec as it changes to your development team, and see how well it integrates after all at the same time. Having the spec also makes all that super coordination "magic" that SCO was talking about seem a little less fairy tale-ish. Lay out a spec, give parts to different people, have them code, and then at the end it all comes together. Who else has been burned by Linux' version of select()? It's coded to the BSD select() man page, unfortunately BSD select() isn't and neither is any other commercial vendor, and Linux select() is not bug compatible with other select()s. There's your miracle for you, the magic of troff. (at least it's not info pages, god no...)
BSDi also had a commercial UNIX, BSD based of course, on x86. I did some work on it. At the time wasn't enterprise ready, at least the version I worked on (the SMP implementation was pretty basic, the kernel was forced to run on a single processor) but in later years it got better and in fact I thimk FreeBSD SMPng is based off ideas from BSDi. My non-lawyer mind wonders how many statements of "fact" in the complaint have to be shown to be false before the case can be dismissed.
On other IANAL notes, I wonder if IBMs law firm is reading these posts and all the other arguments on the other web sites and saying "yeah, thats a good point.. yeah, write that one down."
Sales of the OS were FORBIDDEN by the 1956 consent decree that allowed the monopoly telephone company. It was not until the Bell breakup that they it was even legally possible to sell Unix licenses.
UnixWare to Linux Porting Guide (development tools and the API)
http://people.redhat.com/drepper/
http://people.redhat.com/drepper/sco-porting.pdf
I would agree with you if SCO had even mentioned their recent work with IBM, but they didn't (probably because the IBM lawyers wrote a contract that is unassailable). The entire case stems around the original UNIX source code that SCO acquired from Novell. As such it is a ridiculously specious case. Don't believe me, go read SCO's filing.
From THE COMPLAINT ITSELF:
AIX is licensed SVR2 code
Would someone with some extra points please mod up the parent?
Does this have to do with SCO vs. IBM? Or the grandparent post for that matter?
Please go post in a more relevant topic.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
I sure seems to me that ibm gets screwed over a lot I would sure apriciate someone helping me out on identifying all of the times it has happend because frankly I havent been around that long :). but they got screwed on DOS licensing, OS/2, their proprietary bioses and the "clean room" aproach . . . what else was there?
I don't know the Rules in the jurisdiction under which this was brought. In this jurisdiction, however, because of the Rules which set limits on document length, there are judges here who would send this Complaint back with a terse note saying something like, "Unacceptable. Read the Rules again. Especially [this one]"--the legal version of RTFM.
Around 1275 or so, a young attorney wrote a legal document that was over 250 pages long. Very irritated with his long-windedness, the magistrates ordered that a hole be cut in the center of the entire document, that the document be laid around the lawyer's neck, and that said lawyer was to be paraded around to all four corners of Westminster Abbey where the authorities would recite his crime to the assembled populace.
That would have been a fitting punishment for these folks. On the bright side, they seem to have already written their appellate brief. Judging from the strength of their case, they may need it.
And honestly, WTF was SCO smoking when they decided to do that. When two or more companies collaborate (as opposed to having a customer/provider relationship) somebody *always* gets screwed.
Didn't they learn anything from OSF/1? What about OS/2? What about Itanium?
Although a bit convoluted, it is the Free Software Foundation which is incorrectly identified as GNU here. I was surprised that this was not listed in the actual errors of fact, but I'll concede that it is a MINOR point.
parl
Salt Lake City, Utah
SCO, desperate for money, has employed a number of Mormon boys on bikes to sell SCO software subscriptions in addition to tickets to heaven.
Soon to be in a neighboorhood near you...
"...The author [ESR] personally ran two of these -- Microport and Yggdrasil -- and a third not listed, which was the Dell own-brand port.
SCO competed directly against these ports, and cannot fail to have been aware of their existence. SCO's claim to have been unique in supporting Unix for PCs is therefore not merely false, it is a deliberate and egregious lie."
Everyone who thinks they know anything about this issue but who is under -- say -- forty years of age owes it to themselves to read ESR's brief.
My first experience with UNIX was in '86 -- using SCO Xenix -- on an NEC 80386 in an auto parts store.
SCO as an "enterprise computing environment" UNIX?
Yeah, right...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Hey, why not? Paid execs at a credible linux-affiliate attacking another credible linux-affiliate, and with no evident Microsoft taint at all! Heh heh heh...
feh.
"...When OSDL spun up, IBM gained a choice: work with one small partner that lacks demonstrated expertise or focus on the enterprise market, or join a large consortium of industry heavyweights with man-centuries of relevant experience.
That seems just about enough time for an astute IBM strategist to conclude that SCO was the less likely alternative to sustain a serious Linux development and support effort over time. To any technical person, SCO's own failure to develop expertise beyond its small-business roots seems a more plausible explanation for the switch to OSDL than some nefarious anti-SCO conspiracy by top IBM executives..."
God, I love ESR...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
You go, ESR...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
JFS version 1 was originally on AIX. The version 2 of JFS that appeared in OS/2 Warp Server for e-business was pretty much a rewrite, as far as I know (which at least explains the plethora of initial bugs), and later ported back to AIX. It was _this_ OS/2 JFS that got open-sourced and ported to Linux.
then we little people can take over! and eat their carcasses like little ants! in the end... even though the beat steps all over the ants; ants always end up eating the beast's remains.
Bridgekeeper: What is your favorite UNIX flavor? ... aaaaaaaaaauuuggh!
SCO: SCO Openserver. No, Linux. No, System V
Code or be coded.
Is it my imagination or should this be SCO Unix?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
SCO's complaint shows a handful of news accounts in which IBM officials claim the company will help improve Linux. However, this doesn't serve as proof that IBM violated its agreement to keep SCO's proprietary code secret.
Actually, if one bothers to read the complaint, IBM specifically stated a few things that are likely to prove extremely embarrassing if the case goes to court, and which go way beyond vague promises to improve Linux.
"We're willing to open source any part of AIX that the Linux community considers valuable."
Oops. IBM doesn't own the rights to do that. AIX is licensed to it by SCO. Big problem.
"We don't want to take the risk of being sued for a patent infringement. That is why we don't do distributions, and that's why we have distributors.Because distributors are not so much exposed as we are.So that's the basic deal as I understand it."
Yikes. That's a public statement that IBM was aware that Linux might contain infringements of intellectual property, and that rather than take steps to make sure it didn't, they shielded themselves from IP liability by hiding behind a third party. Any decent lawyer could do a lot with that.
"IBM will exploit its expertise in AIX to bring Linux up to par with UNIX."
Only problem: IBM's expertise in AIX involves familiarity with trade secrets that are the undisputed property of SCO.
Then there are the conditions of IBM's Linux development, which are hosted in the same building as its UNIX development, and in which many Linux developers (according to the complaint) have access to SCO's UNIX code. Perhaps this is a new methodology, "dirty room development". It's fishy at best.
It's not an open and shut case on either side, but the above quotes succeed in making IBM look very bad. The LinuxWorld article, on the other hand, completely ignores every single one of these critical points. It's not an honest treatment of the case, but an ideological one.
Tim
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Many thanks to the S tupid C ruft O rganization, for the light entertainment in the form of their legal department sawing their own legs off.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
two minor things in www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html
1
under 'The meaning of "enterprise scalability"'
in the shortest possible time.journaling file systems
should be
in the shortest possible time.
journaling file systems
2
I thought that JFS was developed by IBM and VxFS was developed by
Veritas ?
In the fourth paragraph under
"SCO's claim to own Unix scalability techniques is weak"
you state that Bell Labs includes JFS (veritas journaling file system)
Furthermore, as previously noted, many Unix developers possess copies of
later versions of the historical Bell Labs source code. We can therefore
state that of the component technologies for enterprise scaling, the
Bell Labs codebase includes JFS (in the form of the Veritas journaling
file system), but none of SMP, LVM, NUMA, or hot-swapping. On Internet
time, the Bell Labs minicomputer-centered codebase of 1989-1995 is
hardly more relevant to today's enterprise scalability challenges on
today's PCs than the inner workings of a WWII-era jeep would be to the
design of this year's Formula One racing cars.
X windows:
The ultimate bottleneck.
Flawed beyond belief.
The only thing you have to fear.
Somewhere between chaos and insanity.
On autopilot to oblivion.
The joke that kills.
A disgrace you can be proud of.
A mistake carried out to perfection.
Belongs more to the problem set than the solution set.
To err is X windows.
Ignorance is our most important resource.
Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems.
Built to fall apart.
Nullifying centuries of progress.
Falling to new depths of inefficiency.
The last thing you need.
The defacto substandard.
Elevating brain damage to an art form.
X windows.
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